To determine how much prior knowledge affects students' performance on a reading comprehension test, a study was undertaken to examine the prior knowledge factor in a reading competency test developed for college freshmen in New Jersey. The passages used in this test are based on common, everyday topics. Subjects were students in two sections of a…

Traditional tests, sometimes called prescientific, and post-modern tests, such as cloze tests and dictations, take the same approach toward content validity: the examinee must show in an "integrated facile performance" that he or she can use the language fluently. Where traditional tests fail is in a third dimension, test method. These…

Little information exists on the coping patterns of parents of chronically ill children although there are 1,000,000 severely chronically ill children in the United States. To address the need for psychosocial services, Arizona is developing a program to serve its citizens. A study was conducted to examine the reliability of a major family coping…

A review of studies on effective principals reveals that a number of methodological problems have prevented the accumulation of findings adequate to producing well developed models of instructional leadership and its effects on school outcomes. Problems of measurement and research design in the existing literature are reviewed and suggestions for…

Two studies were conducted to investigate the predictive validity of prekindergarten and pre-grade 1 screening checklists. In the first study, all 83 students registering for kindergarten at an elementary school were administered Austin and Lafferty's prekindergarten checklist. Toward the end of the school year, the children were administered the…

An analysis is presented by the Puerto Rico office of the College Board of the English as a Second Language Achievement Test (ESLAT), which was undertaken to measure the specifications and item content of the examination against the students' performance. The report, based on 400 randomly selected structure items used in one or more versions of…

The implicit definition of competence and the inferential chain that links the standard-setting process to the decision outcomes of the method are considered for two classes of standard-setting procedures: those involving data-free judgments of items and those involving data-based judgment of items. The major underlying assumptions of competence…

A study examined the nature of the questions contained in two major standardized reading comprehension tests in terms of their centrality to the text. It was hypothesized that the use of a discrimination index for item selection would tend to favor relatively trivial questions. Half the reading selections from the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test…

This booklet is intended to help school personnel, parents, students, and members of the community understand concepts and research relating to achievement testing in public schools. The paper's sections include: (1) test use with direct effects on students (test of certification, selection, and placement); (2) test use with indirect effects on…

Problems in validating ability tests for handicapped students and research approaches to predictive validity are discussed. Validity for handicapped persons tested under regular conditions; for applicants to special programs, and for tests taken under special administrative conditions are considered. Item analysis and the construction of new…

As part of the evaluation of a 5-year longitudinal research and development project in individualized language learning, several alternative methods for testing oral English production were tried out. The Bilingual Syntax Measure was selected for adaptation because of the relative effectiveness of its visual component in eliciting responses.…

A common paradigm in measuring the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion is to present photographs of facial expressions and to ask subjects to identify the emotion. The Affect Blend Test (ABT) uses this method of assessment and is scored for accuracy on specific affects as well as total accuracy. Another method of measuring affect…

The present study: (1) describes the development and make-up of a comprehensive semantic differential measure of school related attitudes for young children; (2) presents evidence for the reliability and the discriminant and convergent validities of the measure; and (3) discusses issues pertaining to the measurement of school-related attitudes in…

The United States Employment Service (USES) Specific Aptitude Test Battery (SATB) for Ticket Agent is evaluated from three points of view: (1) technical adequacy of the research; (2) fairness to minorities; and (3) usefulness of the battery to Employment Service staff and employers in selecting individuals for ticket agent positions. Research…

This paper reviews seven research studies on the subject of readability. The first study reviewed is itself an extensive review of 30 readability formulas described by George A. Klare. Of these, five formulas considered to be interesting, unusual, or classic on the basis of high validity, simplicity or complexity, common or uncommon variables, and…